[svlug-announce] SVLUG Oct. 4th meeting: Ivan Godard on Mill CPU Architecture and Inter-Process Communication

WHEN:

Wednesday, October 4th, 2017
7 - 8:30pm



MAIN PRESENTATION

TOPIC: Mill CPU Architecture and Inter-Process Communication

PRESENTED BY: Ivan Godard,
CTO, Mill Computing

TOPIC SUMMARY:

This will be the twelfth topic publicly presented related to the Mill 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture) general-purpose CPU
architecture.  It will cover Inter-Process Communication for the Mill CPU
architecture family.  The talk will assume a familiarity with aspects of
CPU architecture in general, and C++ programming in particular. 

The Mill is a new general-purpose architectural family, with an emphasis
on secure and inexpensive communication across protection boundaries.
The large (page) granularity of protection on conventional architectures
makes such communication difficult, compared to communication within a
protection boundary, such as a function call.  As a result, the large
granularity has forced communication protocols on conventional
architectures into two models: pass-by-sharing (using shared pages), and
pass-by-copy (using the OS kernel for files/message passing).  Both have
drawbacks: sharing requires difficult-to-get-right synchronization,
while copy involves kernel transitions as well as the costs of the copy
itself. 

Part of a long tradition, the standard Linux kernel is monolithic.  This
means that all application calls for services go across a protection
boundary directly to the kernel, which has total read/write access to
the application's memory, in fact to all memory in the system.  This is
the most basic kind of interprocess communication (IPC) across a
protection boundary.  Clearly this is not the best architecture for
security. 

In other, more secure, operating systems, including alternative versions
of Linux such as SELinux, the operating system is broken up into many
individual programs, each running in its own protection domain.  Using
IPC, an application might make a call to any one of the services, and
the services in turn use IPC to talk with each other on behalf of the
initial request. 

This talk discusses these ideas, and shows how the Mill CPU architecture
is uniquely suited as a platform for a more-secure version of Linux that
allows for fully limited data sharing in both directions, across a
protection boundary, and pays no performance penalty for the tightened
security.


ABOUT THE PRESENTER:

Ivan Godard
(https://hackaday.com/2013/11/18/interview-new-mill-cpu-architecture-explanation-for-humans/)
has designed, implemented or led the teams for 11 compilers for a
variety of languages and targets, an operating system, an
object-oriented database, and four instruction-set architectures.  He
participated in the revision of Algol68, and is mentioned 
(http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/languages/algol68-revisedreport.pdf)
in its Report, was on the Green team that won the Ada language
competition, designed the Mary
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_(programming_language) )
family of system-implementation languages, and was founding editor of
the Machine Oriented Languages Bulletin.  He's Member Emeritus of IFIPS
Working Group 2.4 (Implementation languages), and was a member of the
committee that produced the IEEE and ISO floating-point standard
754-2011. 

Ivan is currently CTO at Mill Computing (https://millcomputing.com/),
a startup now emerging from stealth mode.  Mill Computing has developed
the Mill, a clean-sheet rethink of general-purpose CPU architectures.
The Mill is the subject of this talk.

LOCATION:

 Cavium cafeteria
 2315 N 1st St. (corner of Charcut Ave.)
 north San Jose

 Directions on how to get there are listed at:
 http://www.svlug.org/directions/cavium.php    <--- maps here!

We've tried our very best for these directions to be accurate.
If you have any improvements to make, please let SVLUG's volunteers
know!  [email protected]


POST-MEETING GATHERING (if you want):

La Victoria Taqueria, 1415 N 4th St. near Gish Road, San Jose.
Go south 0.7 miles on N. 1st St. under US-101, then turn half-left
onto Matrix Blvd., in 0.3 miles a slight right onto N. 4th Street,
0.5 miles to La Victoria on your right just before Gish Road.


We look forward to seeing you there!



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